Social Media

ShareYourLook - Social Network for Fashion

ShareYourLook is a new niche community for "fashion addicts, trendsetters, shoppers and designers" that's currently in beta. The site was co-founded by fashion journalist Melissa Ceria, whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. The idea is simple and appealing: upload photos of yourself in your latest outfit, and allow others to rate your look and leave comments, including compliments and quick style tips. There's tagging, too, plus the ability to send photos to others, add them to your favorites and post them to your "styleblog". They also make it super-easy to grab an embeddable photo for your blog or profiles on Friendster, MySpace, hi5 et al (I assume MySpace is popular with the it-crowd, too).

Using the familiar social filters that seem to have been popularized by YouTube, you can find the most recent looks, the most viewed, the most discussed, the top favorites, the top rated looks and the top country. That's a nice element of ShareYourLook: it's truly international, with looks being posted from all around the world. Yet more filters let you sort outfits by price and category.

Being a social network, users also have profile pages with a pic, and the ability to add friends and send messages. You can even subscribe to another user, and see all their latest outfits in your account. The weakest element, meanwhile, is probably the blogging section - these are obviously based on Wordpress, which some might say is lazy, and others might see as resourceful. In truth, its not really an issue that they've used Wordpress (many big name publishers already do), but they could have at least removed the Wordpress URLs, default comments and other telltale signs - a bit more integration with the site would also be nice.

ShareYourLook is a half-decent implementation of a good idea. Its success, of course, will come down to marketing - either by getting the cool people to post these pictures to their blogs and MySpace profiles or (more likely) through the close-knit network of magazine editors and fashionistas. Other new social fashion sites include Fashmatch, StyleHive and TeamSugar.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.